


can you imagine?

by Flora_Obsidian



Series: found families [9]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Family Dynamics, Forgiveness, Gen, Guilt, Regret, Rey Skywalker, Skywalker Family Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-15
Updated: 2017-05-15
Packaged: 2018-11-01 06:26:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10916175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flora_Obsidian/pseuds/Flora_Obsidian
Summary: He doesn't deserve her. Either of them.Anyof them.(Luke talks with his father about forgiveness)





	can you imagine?

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place immediately after "i swear that i'll be around for you" but if you've read the first few stories in this 'verse, you'll know what's going on. I've had a couple people asking for more of our resident Force ghosts interacting with other characters, so I hope this is something like what you guys were looking for.

He doesn't deserve her.

The _Jade Sabre_ is silent but for the hum of engines through the floors. Luke remains the only one awake, taking his wife's place at the helm to monitor their passage through hyperspace; he's supposed to have woken her now that the ship is less than an hour away from arrival, but when he woke up she had been sleeping peacefully, and he hadn't the heart to disturb her. She'll yell at him later for it, he's sure, but he's okay with that. She's alive, so she can yell at him all she wants.

Further down from their room, the Trooper boy, Finn, is sleeping; the next room from him, his daughter is bright and calm in the force, burning like a star and casting warmth on those in her light. His precious little girl, already twenty.

He doesn't deserve her. Either of them. _Any_ of them. There's nothing keeping Mara here with him, but she sleeps at his side and they talk about their fears in the dark as though it were three decades ago. He fled from Leia, his own sister, failed her and Han through failing her son and then _ran_ like a coward instead of facing the consequences of his actions-- and she had been hurt when he came back, but she was always good at taking that hurt and turning it into a weapon of her own, all that anger and suffering making her stronger yet grounding her firmly in the Light. She had lectured him and threatened to drag him home if it was what it took and _your daughter is sick, Luke_ and even then she had wrapped her arms around him in a hug, _I missed you so much_.

And his daughter...

Something twists deep inside him, and it's hard to breathe past the ache in his chest, the lump in his throat, the cold feeling that spreads through him every time he turns to think of the past he left behind. His daughter was supposed to be _safe_ , and he had thought that if he had failed in everything else, at least he had succeeded with that-- only to find that he had failed her worst of all. He had seen Mara fall, had felt her presence vanish in the Force, had no reason to dare hope she was alive; he had run from Leia; but he had left his own daughter, stranded on a desert planet more remote than Tatooine ever was.

She was supposed to be safe.

He can remember, vividly, how she screamed for him to come back even as the family she was staying with assured her it would be all right. He can remember how his world inverted when he and Han and Leia finally put together the pieces of the story – Han said she was a scavenger waiting for her family, and Leia watched her flinch away from contact when it came unexpectedly, and the pilot and the Trooper boy on base requested leave to Jakku and came back with a single storage container of sand-caked scrap from the inside of a hollowed-out Walker, a doll and a helmet and a withered flower, and thousands of marks etched into a wall.

She was _supposed to be_ \--

“ _Kid, easy with the hand. Mara finally got this place fixed up, didn't she?”_

\--what?

His father sits in the copilot's chair, younger than Luke can remember seeing him before, on Endor-- younger than he is, now. He's older than his father ever got to be. Than his mother ever...

“ _Hand,”_ Anakin repeats, gesturing with a nod. _“Chair._ ” Luke unclenches his fingers from the armrest of the pilot's chair, the durasteel digits having torn through the cloth and padding. _“There you go.”_

“Father,” he says.

“ _We stopped by earlier to check on Rey when most everyone was sleeping,”_ the ghost tells him, and something twists inside again. _“Padme talked with Mara, I think.”_

“Oh,” he says.

Anakin doesn't say anything else, just sits and stares out at the swirling blue of hyperspace, and Luke stares as he tries to find words for a father he never really got to know-- he sees parts of himself in his father's face, the cleft chin and blue eyes and the way his hair starts to curl the longer gets. He's never spoken with the ghost of his mother, never seen her outside of holos that survived the Empire's purge of information, and none of those were of good enough quality to see her face, not like this. And yet he can't find a way to say _I want to talk to you_ or _I want to talk to her_.

His father's robes are something like that of the Jedi, but black-- and though he has failed in much and left behind much more, he remembers his roots. A Tatooinian in black is a Tatooinian declaring their freedom; his own gray robes, following suit, free-but-not-quite, tempered.

Force, but he is tired.

“Why did you never tell me?”

Anakin makes a face, and he looks so much like Luke did at twenty that he has to fight back an all-too inappropriate laugh. Funny, how sometimes it's easier to laugh after everything instead of thinking about how much it hurts.

“ _I tried. You were hiding. You and your sister both-- she never wants to see me, and you didn't want to see anyone. I could never find you.”_

 _Are you saying it's my fault?_ he wants to ask and doesn't, because it is. He deserves whatever accusations get thrown at him, regardless of who does the throwing. Anakin, as though he can hear the thoughts in his son's mind, makes another face and shakes his head.

“ _Don't be like that, kid. Our family's a kriffed up mess of bantha fodder, but it's what we've got. Accept that you've made mistakes, work to fix them. Even if you're dead. **Especially** if you're dead. Most people don't get second chances, after all.”_

“I don't deserve a second chance.”

His father blinks at him. Then he gets up, very slow, and walks over, and bends down so he is very much uncomfortably in Luke's personal space, eye-level. He's wrong in thinking that his father looks younger, he realizes this now-- his eyes make it clear _exactly_ how much he has seen. Luke feels like he's a teenager again, and adventure consists of nothing Tosche Station and sneaking into bars with his friends.

“ _ **Do you think I did?”**_

They stay that way in silence for a long few moments. Luke nods, slow. Anakin straightens, walks over, sits back down in the copilot's seat and props his incorporeal feet up on the console.

“ _Tuskens. I slaughtered a village of them when they took my mother-- not just the warriors, but the women, the children. I led the Imperial Fleet and saw planets burn. Official records say Anakin Skywalker died protecting the Jedi Temple when it fell, when Vader and the 501st laid siege, and-- **from a certain point of view** , I did. All the younglings in the creche, little children-- that lightsaber you first carried, that Mara carries now, did you never feel the Dark clinging to it? I tortured your sister, your brother-in-law, cut off your hand, tried to facilitate your Fall.”_

He keeps looking out the viewport, never once shifting his gaze, but he doesn't need to. Those old eyes are seared into the front of his mind; Luke suspects they will join his father's face, pasty gray with still-open wounds, in his troubled dreams.

“ _And after all that, you believed that there was good in me, so why the **hell** can't you see it in yourself? You got the best of your mother and the best of me, don't you **dare** say that you don't deserve it.”_

There is nothing to say. Luke feels... small. Tired. Force, but he is _so tired._

Anakin's gaze softens. He looks tired, too, Luke thinks.

“ _Skywalker women? Hells, nobody deserves them. A force of nature in their own right. But you, Luke-- son, we make mistakes. Us worse than others, fine, sure.”_ A wry smile. _“Rey forgives you. She's alive. Mara's alive. Hold onto that, cherish it while it lasts. You of all people should know that forgiveness is freely offered, not something earned.”_

Luke knows. “It's harder when you're not the one offering.”

Anakin just hums by way of an answer. He knows, too.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed. Comments and kudos are much appreciated.
> 
> For more writerly-related things, come follow me on Tumblr @floraobsidian


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